Zeiss sold Hensoldt quite a while back. It is a completely separate company now. Hensoldt had not had any interest in the civilian sporting optics market for quite some time now. For Zeiss, it is also a trivially small part of what they do. It is a huge company and sport optics is really not a big part of it. They like it for legacy reasons, but it is not exactly top priority. That's probably why all Zeiss Sport Optics products but the highest end stuff has been built by OEMs for a while now.
With modern coatings, extra two air-to-glass surfaces are absolutely insignificant. Your eye can not detect the miniscule difference in light transmission. This nonsense has been circulating for decades and somehow never dies. Modern scopes have quite a few more lenses than older ones, for example, simply because the optical systems are more sophisticated and the perceived brightness is better than with many older designs that have fewer lenses even when the coatings are essentially the same.
These LRP scopes appear to be new design that are not related to any of the existing or legacy Zeiss and Hensoldt scopes, simply because of the 5x erector systems. Hensoldt scopes were built on 4x erectors as were the somewhat related Victory FL, Diavari, etc.
Zeiss website flat out states they are made in Germany, presumably alongside the V8 scopes. All the other currently made Zeiss scopes appear to be outsourced to OEMs.
Thanks for the update on the Zeiss-Hensoldt relationship. I missed that because either Hensoldt did not offer anything of interest or it was unaffordium. Today's Hensoldt obviously focusses on very different markets.
I have to disagree though on the effects of an etched reticle. You stated: "With modern coatings, extra two air-to-glass surfaces are absolutely insignificant. Your eye can not detect the miniscule difference in light transmission." That is not incorrect but also not the whole story.
Rather than throwing around some fancy terms and formulae, let's just apply simple logic. If we take the reticle plate out of the scope and hold it in front of us, will we see the glass or will the reticle just float in space like a hologram? If we see the glass, that means the glass absorbs, reflects, or refracts the light coming from the background to our eyes. Otherwise, the glass would be as invisible as the air around it. Fair enough?
Our eye cannot detect the miniscule quantitative attenuation and the glass certainly does not appear like a grey filter but the glass clearly influences the light transmission in a noticeable, qualitative way because we see it. Now we introduce this glass in one of the two worst places in the system - the focal planes. Any diffraction or distortion there is bad news - magnified. No matter how good we polish the glass and how great the coating is, it still scatters light and introduces noise. That's the best case with a clean, new optic.
The worst case is for example the two Conquest scopes I had to send back to Zeiss due to a clearly visible haze of tiny droplets on the reticle plate. This was most likely caused by volatile fractions of the lubricant evaporating in the intense summer heat and then condensing on the glass surfaces. Obviously, they also condensed on some of the internal lens surfaces but there they were out of focus and much less detrimental. Zeiss fixed one scope at no cost and upgraded the other one to a newer model with a higher zoom ratio.
The argument about the optical effects of reticles is somewhat pointless today since few people will be satisfied with anything other than a Christmas tree. Even a duplex would be a serious pain to craft from gold wire. But they did not put the etched reticles in there to increase performance. Cost savings were the motivations and after they sold the benefits of more complex reticle patterns, there was no going back. They definitely had the choice to use glass when they preferred the more labor intensive gold wires. I still have my grandfather's WWI "Dienstglass" (duty glass) and that has an etched, horizontal reticle, called "Strichplatte" (hash plate).
On the last point, I agree that a big issues with recent Zeiss consumer products is that they are someone else's stuff with a Zeiss logo slapped on.
So the competitors are not really competing with Zeiss on a technical level. I have used 'real' Zeiss products in the science realm for decades and can guarantee you that Zeiss knows how to bend light like few others in the business. Leica can hold a candle to them in some areas but the rest of the field is a lap behind.
If Zeiss builds the LRP scopes in house under similar conditions than their commercial, scientific products, I would not hesitate one second to shell out the coin if that scope fits my needs. Even with their rebranded products you never had to worry about flawless, no-hassle support as stated above. I also let a 'real' Zeiss 10x40 BGA bino tumble down a mountain face a while ago and sent in the sad looking remains for a repair estimate. It came back like new, free of charge. They warrantied my fuck-up. There is no better example for "Buy once, cry once".
